The carriers here in Canada are basically three monopolies..they charge exorbitant bandwidth fees for Internet over a paltry 25 MB/month, so you either use their (expensive) entertainment options or use DVD because it costs way to much to watch over the net. And they give the government campaign contributions bribes and have high-powered lobbyists to keep it that way.

Bucky Katt:Meh! I'm still happily using my VCR. I prefer to stick with tried and true technologies. New innovations are unreliable.

Recently saw an old college friend from the mid-90s. We got high and over the weekend watched what might be the most epic Simpsons VHS collection known to exist in the wild. Many of them taped from original broadcast, which means original commercials. For two stoned guys eating Fritos scoops with whatever sauce/dressing was in the house and drinking warm Budweiser. it was a great weekend.

StreetlightInTheGhetto:We didn't have cable growing up, and also ate dinner with Grandma every Sunday night. So my dad taped the Simpsons, with commercials unless dinner ended early enough to pause them, for about 10 years. There may have been one or two missed episodes, but on the off chance we did he'd just get it on the rerun.

That said, oh yes, fun times were had in college with those tapes.

/gotta find a cheap VHS player somewhere

I think the reason so many of us dish out and recognize Simpsons references, no matter how obscure, is that we had them recorded on VHS and watched the same episodes 17 times. Possibly while high. Cypress Hill, I'm looking in your general direction.

Since your dad "taped" the show for 10 years, I presume you got the really good years.

pippi longstocking:Those estimates are based on MPAA calculations, they actually just sold 5 copies.

Probably. I remember a few years ago when the RIAA had a CD piracy ring raided. They claimed they confiscated 400 CD burners to play up the ability to produce lots of counterfeit copies. The actual count was more like 150, but they were, and I'm paraphrasing, "faster than average burners so it was like having 400."

Yeah, I stream some things. I've got a Netflix subscription. It's nice, but far from perfect. There are massive gaps in what you can find in any streaming service, thanks to licensing issues, even if you subscribed to Hulu, Netflix, Amazon Prime and who knows what else.

Also, streaming is reliant on having a working net connection. Just like anything else "in the cloud". If you're travelling to a place where you can't be assured of a good broadband internet connection, streaming is a waste.

Furthermore, streaming is all subscription based. Don't keep paying that money each month? The show goes away. Should the service ever go out of business, it all vanishes.

Yet more, even if the show/movie you like is on a streaming service, it might go away at any time thanks to the vagaries of licensing. My kid has discovered this, when his favorite show on Netflix went away because the license ran out.

As opposed to DVD. . .where you buy the disc once, and never have to worry about a bad internet connection, or paying a monthly subscription, and far more movies are available.

Netflix et al. is nice for what it is, but there is no way I'll give up my DVD collection for some streaming video service.

Bucky Katt:Meh! I'm still happily using my VCR. I prefer to stick with tried and true technologies. New innovations are unreliable.

I just don't get why I should use up all the badwidth on my computer when I have a hard copy of the movies and shows i like that don't take up much space and are readily available whenever there's a disruption in net service.

The "People still buy DVDs?" crowd are only a few rungs higher than the "I don't own a TV" crowd.

Sure, Blu-Ray quality is great. But have you ripped one to storage lately? DVD MPG quality is plenty good enough on smaller screens and when ripped to storage in mp4 format becomes highly portable. I have gobs of legally purchased DVDs ripped to MP4 format on the home NAS. I don't access them over the web, my ISP is a joke...I move em back and forth between storage and tablet as I choose. The denser data on the Blue-Ray format means longer rip times, greater storage requirements, and no real benefit in portability as they need to be MP4 for the tablet anyways.

Day_Old_Dutchie:The carriers here in Canada are basically three monopolies..they charge exorbitant bandwidth fees for Internet over a paltry 25 MB/month, so you either use their (expensive) entertainment options or use DVD because it costs way to much to watch over the net. And they give the government campaign contributions bribes and have high-powered lobbyists to keep it that way.

I quite often flip between HD and non-HD versions of the same broadcast and I've got to say - HD is no more immersive than non-HD. You can see the extra detail but who needs to see the weave of someone's clothes to be immersed in a drama? On a 72" screen it'll make a difference, but at 38" it's irrelevant.